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Once the biggest movie genre in the world?

posted 8 years ago by Askur
9 replies | jump to latest

From an interview with Jonathan Nolan:

http://www.ew.com/article/2016/12/05/westworld-finale-interview

Some of my favorite movies are the Sergio Leone adaptations of the Akira Kurosawa samurai films: The Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven. In the period when the Western was the biggest genre in the world, the interplay between Westerns and samurai films in the domestic market in Japan was really cool. On that meta level, those two genres have this almost incestuous relationship with each other.

I knew Westerns used to be bigger than they are today, but I had no idea that they were actually the biggest genre some decades back.

[–] MikeF-6 8 years ago

There have been some good (and some not so good), albeit low budget, westerns made in the past few years. Whether this will amount to a comeback is yet to be seen. For example:

Appaloosa (2008) / Ed Harris
The Salvation (2014) / Kristian Levring
Das finstere Tal (2014) (The Dark Valley) / Andreas Prochaska
Diablo (2015) / Lawrence Roeck
The Timber (2015) / Anthony O’Brien

And, of course, a couple of high profile films (both of which I pretty much hate):

True Grit (2010) / Ethan and Joel Coen (virtually a shot for shot remake of a great classic)
Django Unchained (2012) / Quentin Tarantino (not really a western, taking place in the slave holding south before the Civil War. Supposedly; a satire of '60s Italian westerns that only manages to take Spaghetti western tropes and crank them up to 11. Dull and repetitious.)

We can hope for a comeback, but, like musicals, directors want to make them more "modern" and "with it" using dialog and editing that undercuts the genres. When those new westerns and musicals fail, the Hollywood studios become more and more convinced that it is the westerns' fault instead of the truth, viz. today's directors don't know how to make them.

mf

Trust me. I’m The Doctor.